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Comment by inetsee | Hacker News Reader

I have the Freestyle Libre system. The probe that "pokes through your skin" only happens once every two weeks, and my experience is that inserting a new Freestyle sensor hurts less than the average finger stick blood test. Before I got the Freestyle Libre I was doing finger sticks 4 or more times a day. With the Freestyle Libre I am checking my blood glucose an average of 20 times a day, and if I download the data from the Reader I can see glucose readings every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day.

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I'm waiting to go back to them, a bit of a juggle to get insurance to pay until the current sensor or maybe transmitter runs out. I got angry at their customer service when I knocked a sensor off, so I tried the Dexacom g6, but their software is insanely bad. On top of that their sensors are only for 10 days which is much more of a scheduling hassle. And after all the pain of their icky software the killing point is they have an unsilenceable "6 hours to sensor expiration" alarm that can and will go off in the middle of the night, unless you actually power down the device or your phone. I hated their device and the phone connected anyways. The Freestyle had much better software with sophisticated graphs showing trends over long time periods to spot typical low and high time periods.

For what it's worth, I've gotten multiple replacements after they've fallen off using their online form: https://www.freestyle.abbott/us-en/support/sensor-support-fo...

You can silence the expiration warnings in Settings > Alerts > Scheduled, disable Always Sound. You will still be alerted for critical lows and actual sensor failure. I know you moved to Freestyle but other Dexcom users might be reading.

Yeah, I think they're a huge advance for people who are already used to stabbing themselves. But they're still invasive in the sense that they have to keep the probe inside your body for 2 weeks. If Apple can nail the light-through-the-skin approach, the audience size jumps by 1-2 orders of magnitude.

Way less than a finger stick. And you only do it once per two weeks, instead of multiple times a day.

And the Libre3 is so much better than anything else I've tried before.

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